In hard disc read/write devices of a known type, the read/write heads are glued directly to the end of a steel suspension unit, which allows the head to be moved at a predetermined distance from the disc, currently approximately 30 nm.
To obtain more accurate and finer head position control, it has been proposed to arrange a microactuator between the head and the steel suspension unit. This microactuator must impart to the head (which generally has a weight of a few milligrams) an acceleration that is 20-30 times that of gravity; this means that the microactuator should be able to exert a force of approximately tenths of milliNewtons to be suitable for this purpose.
The microactuator must also be very flexible in a plane parallel to the disc, as well as being highly resistant in a perpendicular direction, to support the weight of the head (currently 1.5 mg), and to oppose the pressure generated during operation. In fact, as the disc rotates, a pressure profile is generated on the surface of the latter which tends to move the head away from the disc. On the other hand, if the head is moved away from the disc further than predetermined limits, the signal is so attenuated to make it impossible to read/write data; as a result, to maintain the required position, the suspension unit must currently exert on the head a direct force of approximately 2-3 g towards the disc.
The integrated microactuators available to date use actuation forces of electromagnetic and electrostatic nature.
Microactuators using electromagnetic forces are disadvantageous, because they require depositing of magnetic materials that are not commonly used in the microelectronics industry. Because the data on the disc is stored by magnetizing the disc surface, interference effects are possible between the data recording on the disc and the actuation mechanism. Furthermore, structures that use magnetic forces are more difficult to scale than those that use electrostatic forces.
Microactuators which use electrostatic type forces are preferable, both as regards the possibility of manufacturing the microactuators using conventional microelectronics production techniques, and because of the compatibility with the processes of reading and writing data on the disc.
Various solutions have been proposed for producing microactuators of an electrostatic type; according to a first solution, the elements of the actuator are produced by surface micromachining, i.e., by using surface layers deposited on a wafer of semiconductor material, or by electro-galvanic growth, or through ad hoc processes that differ from those normally used in microelectronics.
The technique of surface micromachining has the disadvantage that it does not allow manufacturing of structures having the above-described requirements, because the thinness of the polysilicon films which can be produced by common deposition techniques make the final structures not sufficiently rigid in a direction perpendicular to the disc; in addition, they cannot impart sufficient accelerating electrostatic force to the head, and are unstable because the edge effects are higher than the surface effects, and the system is less linear.
The system using galvanic growth, in which layers of metallic material are used, has the disadvantage that it has worse mechanical characteristics (in particular with reference to the yield strength .sigma., and is subject to hysteresis (whereas silicon does not have hysteresis); on the other hand the solution which uses ad hoc processes is difficult to industrialize, and has low yields.